Sentence Structure for Paragraph Writing

At Saint Mary’s Grade School in September 1946, words and I became friends. An earlier posting explained how Sister Mary McCauley invited our fifth-grade class to learn forty-five prepositions. With these prepositions + a noun and a verb we learned to construct and claim sentences. 

            A second posting detailed how she then introduced us to the other parts of speech. Ultimately, she explained their use in sentences, such as subject, predicate, object of a preposition, direct object, indirect object, predicate nominative. With this information, we built more sentences.

            Here’s a sentence describing what I see right now: On her fleece-lined cat bed Maggie snores genteelly. Sister Mary McCauley would explain that this was a simple sentence with one subject—Maggie—and one predicate—snores.

            Today I’ll pick up the thread of those two earlier postings by describing how, in sixth grade, I learned about the three types of sentences and their variations. Once again, Sister Mary McCauley used magazine pictures to encourage us to build sentences that later appeared on bulletin boards.

            For our picture, we built a web of simple sentences of subject + predicate. Next came compound subjects—Maggie and Ellie snored. Next, compound predicates. Maggie snored and stretched. Finally, compound subjects + compound predicates. We then wrote paragraphs that used the four types of simple sentences we’d learned:

A) one subject + one predicate

B) compound subject + predicate

C) subject + compound predicate

D) compound subject + compound predicate.

Using these letters, Sister Mary McCauley gave us a roadmap for a paragraph. For example: A, B, D, B, A, C, A. Each day she presented us with different magazine photos and a different roadmap.

           

            We then explored compound sentences. Maggie snored and Ellie stretched. Now Sister Mary McCauley began to use the word clause to describe any group of words with a subject and a predicate. Then came roadmaps for paragraph building with the four types of simple sentences + compound sentences and their variations.       

    

            In seventh grade, she introduced us to complex sentences and their independent and subordinate clauses: As Maggie snored, her human composed a blog posting. Once again, roadmaps such as S, C, CX, C, S, S, CX. Using that roadmap, let’s write Maggie’s story today.

(S) Maggie sleeps contentedly on my computer desk. (C) Sometimes she snores, but often she settles deeper into the fleece-lined pillow and purrs. (CX) As she snoozes, I soundlessly leave the desk. (C) She’s weary from her dreams and my absence does not disturb her. (S) Then the sound of the can opener reaches Maggie’s finely tuned ears. (S) She leaps from the computer desk and races down the hall. (CX) When she spies the bowl of tangy tuna sitting on the floor, she hunkers down to the business of the day: eating.

Maggie 

By seventh grade, the roadmaps had gotten more complicated and detailed with various kinds of simple, compound, and complex sentences. Thus, did I learn to vary my sentences so as to move a reader quickly or slowly through a story.                  

Just think of all we know and take for granted as we write. Daily, we sit at our computers and type our postings and comments. The nouns and verbs present themselves to us as subjects and predicates, direct objects, objects of prepositions.             

We don’t think about parts of speech or sentence elements; we simply communicate our thoughts in the English syntax. We don’t need to know these names or terms and yet I admit to taking delight in those roadmaps—both in the 1940s and now!

How about you? How did you learn to write so well?

The first three photographs from Wikipedia.

Building Blocks of Writing and Speaking

In fifth grade, Sister Mary McCauley introduced the eights parts of speech to us as “building blocks.” She cut out a different colored block of construction paper for each speech part. Throughout the school year, we learned what each block represented and its use in sentences.

            To activate our brains we’d started, as I posted last Sunday, with memorizing forty-five prepositions and using them to make up story-sentences. Thus we had already used nouns and verbs together. Soon our more formal training in their use began.

             We started with nouns and ended with interjections. In between we met brightly colored blocks for pronouns, verbs, adjectives and articles, adverbs, and conjunctions. Of course, we’d already memorized that list of prepositions.

            Sister used these blocks to build sentences on the bulletin board. By the end of the school year, we twenty-six fifth graders had learned the power of the eight parts of speech and their syntax. We had also mastered sentence parts: subjects, verbs, objects, and complements.

            With our blocks we stacked words in different ways and found what we could build with them. Here are the activities I remember as we began to construct with our building blocks:  

·      Sister gave each of us a colorful magazine picture. We listed in our Big Chief Tablet all the persons, places, and things we saw. We used these pictures throughout the year as we learned each new part of speech.

·      Next, we took our tablets home and wrote in them all the nouns we saw. The next day, we shared our lists and got ribbons for outstanding nouns. The noun block went on the bulletin board. All alone.

·      We learned additional nouns, going from general to specific: Vehicle, car, sedan, Chevrolet. Animal, cat, tiger, Tony the Tiger. Toy, game, Monopoly. House, room, kitchen, pantry. Furniture, footstool, hassock, ottoman.

·      Each of us pantomimed doing something while the rest of our classmates called out each action they saw us perform.

·      We took our Big Chief tablets home and wrote in them all the verbs/actions we saw. The next day we got ribbons for our most descriptive actions; zoom, whittle, stumble, twist. Sister pinned the verb block to the right of the noun on the bulletin board. Thus, we saw first visual of the most common syntax of the English language.

·      Once again we learned more specific synonyms: Walk, amble, meander, stroll, plod, hike. Run, dash, sprint. Smile, laugh, guffaw, chortle, giggle, tee-hee, smirk. Read, peruse, scan, skim.  

·      Next we built simple sentences with our lists of nouns and verbs: Cats jump. Mothers read. Dads whittle. Dogs protect. Cars zoom. Children play.

·      Each of us pantomimed a noun and its action before the class: book falls, foot kicks, hand raises, lips whistle, face smiles, eraser erases, chalk writes.

·      We returned to our tablet pages of nouns and added a one-word description of each: Furry kittens jump. Busy mothers read. Tired dads whittle. Yellow dogs protect. Racing cars zoom. Happy children play. The adjective block went on the bulletin board to the left of the noun.

·      We did the same for our list of actions: Furry kittens jump high. Busy mothers read aloud. Tired dads whittle easily. Yellow dogs scratch frantically. Racing cars zoom nosily.

·      Sister added the adverb block to the right of the verb. We now had four different colored blocks in a line: Adjectival modifier, noun subject, verb predicate, and adverbial modifier.

·      The list of assignments and activities went on throughout the year: block by block, step by step, a progression of learning.

·      Ultimately, we got to sentences with a modified subject, a modified verb or action word, a noun used as a direct object, and a number of prepositional phrases used to describe the nouns or the verb.

·      To do all this, Sister would usually start by pantomiming a scene that became a sentence. We might end up with the following: In her frayed black habit, the tired teacher accidentally dropped the dog-eared geography book on the wooden desk by the window.

Now we were ready for sixth grade when we would begin to study the various types of sentences and learn more about punctuation. In seventh grade we’d diagram these sentences and locate misplaced modifiers. It was there that syntax began to make sense.

Is this how you learned the parts of speech and how to build sentences? When did you first begin to realize the power of words? And how has that early training affected your writing? Have you had to forget a few things?!?!?   

                                                                                                              

All photographs from Wikipedia.